The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [29]
“I believe you,” Montoya said. “Still, I want to apologize for our behavior yesterday.”
“That’s not necessary. It’s perfectly natural to get frustrated when a police investigation stalls, no matter what the circumstances.”
“Blaming you or your department serves no purpose. My sister and I talked; we won’t cause you any problems.”
“I appreciate that.”
Montoya solemnly shook hands and departed. Kerney knew the sudden resurgence of goodwill might well be fleeting. The need to finger-point and blame could easily return. He’d seen it happen time and again with family survivors, who could go from feelings of numbing anguish to blistering outrage within a matter of minutes.
He read the return address and the enclosed sympathy note, called information, and got a new residential listing for Kent Osterman in Los Alamos. He dialed the number, identified himself to the woman who answered, explained the reason for his call, and learned that Osterman was at work. The number she gave him at the Los Alamos National Laboratory yielded Osterman’s voice mail.
He hung up without leaving a message. On his way out of the administrative suite he paused at Helen’s desk and told her where he was going.
“Did you know more people with PhD degrees live in Los Alamos, per capita, than anywhere else in the country?” she said.
Kerney nodded. “And most of them are pursuing peace in our time by designing new, improved weapons of mass destruction. Doesn’t that give you a warm, fuzzy feeling?”
“That’s the other thing about working with cops,” Helen said with a laugh.
“What?”
“You’re all so cynical.”
“Only about people,” Kerney replied.
Los Alamos was coming back from a major forty-thousand-acre forest fire that had burned down hundreds of homes and scorched the adjacent national forest with heat so intense that large swaths of ground were barren of growth. On ridgelines random exclamation points of blackened timber stood as silent reminders of the catastrophe. During the summer months, monsoon rains eroded canyon slopes, buckled roads, broke sewage lines, flooded streets, and seeped into basements.
But with the damage and destruction confined to several heavily forested residential areas, the urban core of the city still looked tidy. High in the Jemez Mountains on a narrow plateau, it was thirty-five miles from Santa Fe. For all practical purposes, it was a corporate town with one industry, a national research laboratory created by the legacy of the atomic bomb. No matter how the chamber of commerce or the town fathers tried to soften the image, Los Alamos remained a place of scientists, spies, and secrets.
He passed through the town center and parked in Technical Area Three, a cluster of buildings including a four-story, flat-roofed, concrete structure that housed the lab’s administrative offices.
Signs were everywhere, directing foot traffic to the J. Robert Oppenheimer Study Center, which served as a staff library, a badge office, which Kerney found to be an interesting euphemism for a guard station, and a building that contained the personnel offices and an employee cafeteria. A number of the other buildings in the complex were off-limits, but the personnel department could be visited without going through the security checkpoint.
Halfhearted attempts had been made to landscape the complex with sloping walkways, some trees, and a few planters, but the look was purely industrial and utilitarian, and mostly dismal. Aesthetics did not seem to be a high priority to those building the modern engines of war.
Outside the personnel building, racks held a number of newspapers, some clearly antinuclear in point of view. A small, empty water fountain near the entrance was splattered with bird droppings. The lobby displayed the various presentation bowls and platters that employees would receive on completion of significant years of service.
In the cafeteria the dress code for the patrons on their coffee breaks ran from casual to sloppy, with a lot of mismatched outfits, especially among the men, who seemed to favor top-of-the-line running